Posted
by
timothyon Saturday March 13, 2010 @06:35PM
from the how-to-spot-a-special-interest dept.

krou writes "Talking to the BBC at a private function held at the Royal Society in London, former astronauts Jim Lovell and Eugene Cernan both spoke out about Obama's decision to postpone further moon missions. Lovell claimed that 'it will have catastrophic consequences in our ability to explore space and the spin-offs we get from space technology,' while Cernan noted he was 'disappointed' to have been the last person to land on the moon. Said Cernan: 'I think America has a responsibility to maintain its leadership in technology and its moral leadership ... to seek knowledge. Curiosity's the essence of human existence.' Neil Armstrong, who was also at the event, avoided commenting on the subject."

It's totally inconceivable to imagine that when the Japanese Astronauts, the Chinese Taikonauts and the Indian Hehenauts live and work in their respectable moon-bases, we Americans are still stuck in the bottom of the gravity well.

The worst of all is this --- Not only are we stuck here, we rather waste time debating if we want to give the degenerates free healthcare than find ways to send our troopers to the moon.

I'd rather have health care than a trip to the moon for 4 people.
Maybe if we hadn't squandered a trillion dollars on the unnecessary war in Iraq we could afford things like going to the moon again.

This.

A big portion of our bleeding economy is flowing out the giant bullet hole labeled "War against terror." and if we just stopped a _single_ _war_ that we're involved with we'd have a ton of money to put towards all sorts of stuff.

I don't get your point. WW1 started because Austria-Hungry was occupying territory, and the population of said territory got pissed off and launched a terrorist attack. Everything beyond that was politics or military strategy, but the root cause of it all was troops being somewhere where they wern't wanted, which would seem to me to support the point he was trying to make.

How does what you were referring to relate to my referration to your referral?

Wait... what?

I don't care what he said. I was responding to you. You suggested that the only reason "they" are attacking is because "we" are in "their" country. How in the world do you come to that conclusion?

Leave aside the fact that Al Qaeda doesn't actually have a country per-say, and that even if they were based out of a specific nation it wouldn't be "theirs" by any stretch of the imagination... even if we ignore all tha

You're thinking of an empire in the 18th and 19th-century sense of the word – a sense that died its last official breath after WWII, when Britain released the last of its official colonies. In that era, when the nation-state was the ultimate expression of power, a colony flew the colonizer's flag, spoke its language, had the colonizer's religion imposed upon it. Going back into the heyday of colonialism, conquest was government-centric; national glory was the cause.
With the rise of international business, however, the nation-state itself has been supplanted by the multinational corporation. They do not work for the glory of the nation, but for their own glory. They do not respect the laws of the nation, and do not obey except where those laws are convenient or enforceable. In short, the heyday of the nation-state is over.
Let it not be said that the nation-state is dead, though. We're still in the centuries-long transition between forms of cultural organization, so while governments are the only ones permitted to hold the weapons (this, too is changing and will continue to change over our lifetimes), the multinationals' interests dictate where those weapons are pointed and when.
This is why the United States has military presence in over a hundred countries in a time of peace. These are the agents of modern colonialism.
This is why there are terrorist attacks against our troops and our cities and citizens. Not because they hate our freedoms, but because we are camped out, toting guns, on their land, and have been for a hundred years now.

We are a collection of fairly divided states and territories. Really, none of the old definitions apply anymore.

So the Army of Kentucky decided it would be a good move to go into Bagdad? You tried to win an argument by redefining the language to something other than what everyone else uses - not a very pleasant trick but increasingly common.People haven't really changed, it's as much an empire as the Roman Republic was with client states and outposts. An empire that resembled it more closely was the Austrian-Hungarian empire in the late 1800s, you might want to read what Mark Twain wrote about that and you'll see a few similarities with the USA today. It's not necessarily a good or bad thing, it's just a label. What the empire actually does is the important thing

Everything I have experienced as a Iraq combat vet disagrees with this. All the threats we face are threats of our own creation coming home to roost, often decades later and because of our lack of foresight. For example, our backing of the creation of Israel as an American front to help maintain the middle east with nuclear weapons, which then turns more Arabs against us. Then there are things like our "support" of democracy by doing things like overthrowing Iran's democratically elected leader and installi

I know the DoD argues that our nuclear stockpile helps prevent proliferation: our allies feel secure with our protection, so they don't start nuclear programs. If they did start such programs, their neighbors (who may not be allies) would feel compelled to get nuclear programs of their own. How many nukes we need to maintain this stability, and how bad the proliferation would be when we go too low- those points are up for debate. I do think the argument has merit to it.

Resources have been and always will be a great excuse to go to war. Considering the unsustainable growth rate of the human species it is only a matter of time before incredibly populous countries (for example, China) decide that they need to expand. The only thing keeping them from choosing to expand into the US is our military. The only thing keeping them from expanding into Russia is the Russian military. Same goes for Japan and so on.

That and a GIGANTIC FUCKING OCEAN! The only reason we can afford to fight so many wars is that it is very hard to invade America.

You may not have heard, but we've developed these things called "ships" and "airplanes" over the last couple centuries. You should read up on them - they're really kinda cool! Some 70 years ago, they allowed forces from the US, Canada, and Australia to successfully invade and defeat enemies in several nations, even though there were oceans in between!

I know, I know, it's hard to believe. Don't take my word on it - I'm sure if you google "World War 2" you should be able to come up with some confirmatory evidence.

You sure you aren't American? As your knowledge of history points to being American educated.The US, Australia and Canada did not invade and defeat enemies across the ocean. They went across the the Ocean to a base on an Island just a few miles away from the mainland called the British Isles and attacked from there. Look it up, the invasion of Europe was launched from England.Also one of the main reasons for the success of the invasion was due to the USSR attacking overland from the other direction.Up the p

Yeah, Obama's record-high deficit spending has nothing at all to do with our budget problems.

This thread is about U.S. government spending, based upon budgets and laws passed by the Congress and signed into law by various U.S. Presidents. When you call the U.S. government deficit spending "Obama's deficit spending" as if he was a dictator, you lose credibility as a rational fiscal conservative (which I am).

For example, a large portion of the current deficit is due to greatly reduced tax receipts caused by the recession that began prior to Obama taking office. Other large portions of the deficit are

Access to health care is still a big problem in the USA. But huge swaths of modern medicine are the result of human space travel. It's hard to find anything today that isn't in some way reliant on space-related research.

I'm not saying that postponing a manned return to the Moon is catastrophic by itself - but we depend on space travel for so much today that scaling back our efforts there amounts to saving pennies today (NASA's budget is a tiny drop in the federal budget!) by throwing away potentially massive results tomorrow. And this is aside from how important exploration is in purely human terms.

I'm not saying that postponing a manned return to the Moon is catastrophic by itself

If you're interested in NASA doing R&D (which you seem to be) you're on the wrong side of this argument. The whole point is to get NASA out of the mud and back to actually doing R&D on things that haven't already been done over and over.

To me this comes down to the fact that there are three ways to "get stuff into space":

spend gobs of money reinventing the wheel to do it in-house at NASA, in some way that inherently doesn't compete with the private aerospace companies

Plus, let's face it, those old Apollo and pre-Apollo astronauts are a wacky bunch of old coots. The ones that aren't out on the ufo circuit are into new age silliness or Republican politics. They're still living in the late 1960's. They're idea of a space program is a "space race" where we "get there" before the Russians and stick a flag in the dirt, take a picture and go home.

In fact, Jim Lovell, who owns a restaurant here on the North Shore just outside Chicago, is a big fundraiser for the GOP. I'm su

Check out the analysis [chron.com] at the "Houston Chronicle". The analysis states, "President Obama 'dramatically broke' a campaign pledge when he announced plans to cancel NASA's $108 billion Bush-era Constellation program to return astronauts to the moon by 2020.

That's the conclusion of an independent fact-checking organization known as PolitiFact.

The organization's nonpartisan assessment is expected to be widely quoted by supporters of NASA who are trying to reverse Obama's decision on Capitol Hill. "

Like many politicians before him, Barack Hussein Obama broke a campaign promise. He outright lied in order to get the votes independent voters.

How did he break a promise to fund Constellation? From a previous Slashdot story [slashdot.org]

"In a recent article on The Space Review, Greg Zsidisin reveals that Barack Obama plans to delay Project Constellation for at least five years, using the redirected funds to nationalize early-education for children under five years old to prepare them for the rigors of kindergarten and beyond, if he is elected president. It is feared that if this happens the Vision for Space Exploration will flounder and that may be the end of human spaceflight altogether."

Seems like he's just following through on what he said almost 2 years ago.

The richest people in the U.S. have, on average, shorter lives than those in nations with universal health care. And these people have access not only to the insurance policy of choice, but to the doctors and hospitals of choice as well.

That is on average, and there are a lot of reasons why average life span is less that just health care. Drug related violence for one, auto accidents for another which both kill a lot more people per-capata in the US than, say, Western Europe.

For example, life expectancy is higher at birth in the U.K., by 1.7 years for males and.9 years for females, but life expectancy at older ages is greater in the U.S. than in the U.K. For men, life expectancy is greater at birth and up until age 60 in the U.K., but then the pattern reverses and men can expect to live longer in the U.S. at ages 65, 70, 75, 80 and 85. By age 75, male life expectancy is greater than in the U.K. by at least six months. Likewise, U.K. women have higher life expectancy at birth and up until age 55; at ages 60 and above, American women have greater life expectancy than their U.K. counterparts, and by age 75 women live longer in the U.S. than in the U.K. by 8-9 months.

I don't have an explanation for this, but these numbers would seem to suggest that there are other factors at work than just access to health care. Most people can expect to receive the great bulk of their medical care at the end of their life. Since once you reach the age of 60 in the US you can expect to live longer than you counterparts in the UK it seems to me that there are other factors at play. Here is a crap load of data if interested: http://www.irdes.fr/EcoSante/DownLoad/OECDHealthData_FrequentlyRequestedData.xls [irdes.fr]

As for the rest, yes, but it wasn't only money seeking ambitious people who gave me that. I don't recall Mr.Alan Turing being a money seeking ambitious. In fact, he was in fact tortured 'till suicide.Besides him, there are some other mathematicians/computer scientists that I don't recall getting rich

Anyway, I'm from Thailand, so I don't really care either way things roll. If the US doesn't bring its health care system up to the level of other industrialized nations and becomes paralyzed by preventable chronic conditions, it will be good for Thailand's "health tourism" industry.

No, it wont. More coverage equals more cost, period. Even the Congressional Budget Office has come to that conclusion.

Two of the biggest false promises being made about universal care are that universal coverage and more testing will save money. Neither do. The more people you cover, the more its going to cost. There are some savings to be had from having a bigger pool, but the biggest costs in care won't be affected.

The only way universal care could actually cut costs is to limit services.

Interesting, but ultimately ineffective. Are you suggesting, therefore, that three times more productive medical services are conducted on every person in the US per year than on every person in the UK per year?

Are you suggesting, therefore, that three times more productive medical services are conducted on every person in the US per year than on every person in the UK per year?

Doesn't matter. None of the proposed Democrat reforms implement a UK-style system. I get the impression people think that universal coverage magically means less cost. They don't understand the control over costs and demand for health care that countries like the UK have and need to have. The US would not have those controls. It would simply make more people pay for more expensive health care and insurance.

When the pension systems were implemented, typically a man would work for 45 years, paying into the system, and then live for maybe 5 years past retirement, drawing on that same system.

It worked simply because the life expectancy past retirement wasn't more than a few years.

Now people are living longer after retirement than they ever worked, and drawing more from the system than they ever payed in. The pensioners now are using the current working populations contributions. So what will be left when today's workers reach retirement age ?

That IS a pyramid scheme, whether you like it or not.

It has nothing to do with "great outlook", it's got everything to do with cold hard reality.

I think providing health care for our own citizens would be a valuable thing.

Iraq has already cost a trillion dollars, and we aren't at the 10 year mark yet. I don't remember one scintilla of debate about how much that was going to cost. Of course at the time Colin Powell was busy waving vials of talcum powder in front of the UN, and the Secretary of State was talking about "proof in the form of a mushroom cloud". That type of fear-mongering tend

The coverage provisions will have a net cost of $624 billion for the ten years from 2010 to 2019, and a gross cost of $875 billion over the same ten years, the $624 billion number is what is actually relevant. However, with new taxes and other cost savings the bill would implement, the total effect of the bill on the budget deficit would be to lower the deficit by saving $118 billion over ten years. On the other hand the CBO estimate in 2003 for the bill that established Medicare Part D stated the new (at the time) benefits would have outlays (costs) of $460.7 billion from 2004 to 2013. That is here:

Okay braintrust, here is the fact. Bush kept the Iraq and Afghanistan wars off of his budget the entire time he was in office. A HUGE chunk of that total is Bush's wars that Obama put on the budget for the first time since we invaded. No more emergency war supplemental bills. They're on the budget now.

And thanks for clearing up why you're so uninformed. Glenn Beck is a self-proclaimed "rodeo clown", and the fact that you don't think you look like a fool for parroting his absolute bullshit puts a smile on my face. Tell me, how did that interview with Massa go? The one that had the potential to "change the course of this nation"? LOL

Scientists aren't competent in everything. There are plenty biologists who wouldn't want to go to Mars for research, and I imagine that people with an interest in space aren't that interested in forests either.

Also, if you neglect a field of research people with experience in it disappear, and are hard to replace later. We can't just forget about space for 20 years until the economy improves. If we do that the people who used to build engines, research rockets, investigate how to live in space, etc, will di

Bringing men to the moon currently wouldn't add anything of value. It was possible in the '60s, doing it now would not bring any advancement. Space money is better spent on research for new propulsion systems and ways to get off the Earth. When that is done, THEN go to the moon.

if the republicans got elected the same thing would be going on - very little funding to NASA etc... Now, I can't help but wonder if both sides are really just one side... The all have two things in common. They got elected, and they want to stay elected. That's politics 101.

Granted, there are a *lot* of wastes in government I would like to see go away before government-funded manned spaceflight, but the US deficit is growing *dangerously* large. If the partisan divide is too great to eliminate anything else, something has to go, at least temporarily, before our social services go completely by the wayside, or much, much worse. I'm not saying that this is anywhere near the best choice. But these days, our country is divided that nothing else can be agreed on. Our politicians ar

... The President courageously decided to redirect our nation's space policy away from the foolish and underfunded Moon race that has consumed NASA for more than six years, aiming instead at boosting the agency's budget by more than $1 billion more per year over the next five years, topping off at $100 billion for NASA between now and 2015. And he directed NASA to spend a billion per year on buying rides for American astronauts aboard new, commercially developed space vehicles-that's American space vehicles. Other NASA funds will go into developing and testing new revolutionary technologies that we can use in living and working on Mars and its moons.... For the past six years America's civil space program has been aimed at returning astronauts to the Moon by 2020. That's the plan announced by President George W. Bush in January of 2004. That plan also called for developing the technologies that would support human expeditions to Mars, our ultimate destination in space. But two things happened along the way since that announcement, which became known as the Vision for Space Exploration.

First, the President failed to fully fund the program, as he had initially promised. As a result, each year the development of the rockets and spacecraft called for in the plan slipped further and further behind. Second and most importantly, NASA virtually eliminated the technology development effort for advanced space systems. Equally as bad, NASA also raided the Earth and space science budgets in the struggle to keep the program, named Project Constellation, on track. Even that effort fell short.

To keep the focus on the return to the Moon, NASA pretty much abandoned all hope of preparing for Mars exploration. It looked like building bases on the Moon would consume all of NASA's resources. Yet despite much complaining, neither a Republican-controlled nor a Democratic-controlled Congress was willing or able to add back those missing and needed funds. The date of the so-called return to the Moon slipped from 2020 to heaven-knows when. At the same time, there was no money to either extend the life of the Space Shuttle, due to be retired this year, or that of the International Space Station, due to be dropped into the Pacific Ocean in 2015, a scant handful of years after it was completed.

Enter the new Obama administration. Before deciding what to do about national space policy, Obama set up an outside review panel of space experts, headed up by my friend Norm Augustine, former head of Lockheed Martin and a former government official. Augustine's team took testimony and presentations from many people with ideas on what way forward NASA should take (that group included me). In October, it presented its report to the President and to Dr. John Holdren, Obama's science advisor and a friend and colleague of mine. The report strongly suggested the nation move away from the troubled rocket program, called Ares 1, and both extend the life of the space station and develop commercial ways of sending astronauts and cargoes up to the station. And it suggested a better way to spend our taxpayer dollars would be not focused on the Moon race, but on something it called a "Flexible Path." Flexible in the sense that it would redirect NASA towards developing the capability of voyaging to more distant locations in space, such as rendezvous with possibly threatening asteroids, or comets, or even flying by Mars to land on its moons. Many different destinations and missions would be enabled by that approach, not just one.

But with the limited NASA budget consumed by the Moon, no funds were available for this development effort -- until now. Now President Obama has signaled that new direction -- what

The Obama Plan calls for the US to trade in 30 years of on orbit experience launching a 100 ton Space Shuttle, to allow some rich adventurers to rediscover Gemini technology. It makes absolutely no sense.

One of the things we learned about the Shuttle was that it was a disaster for the US space program. You can have a hugely expensive launch vehicle or you can have a space program. That's the dichotomy that NASA has faced for the past 30 years. We found that out in light of the fallout from the Challenger accident. In 1990, we should have been putting together a cheaper replacement for the Shuttle. Instead, twenty years later we still haven't done so. This is the greatest failure of the US space program, tha

Buzz Aldrin is a well known gadfly and has little influence compared Jim Lovell, Gene Cernan, and Harrison Schmidt.

I doubt that is true. But you believe what you want.

The thing that bothers me here is we've had numerous plans to go to the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere. The last such one, Constellation which for all practical purposes was the Ares I launch vehicle with some fuzzy destination goals. None of the leadership at NASA under Griffin would ever be accountable for the resulting failure.

Obama might be setting the US up for another space program failure. He certainly has been turning gold into lead in various oth

The good news for sure is an increase of $6 billion over the next five years. It stresses new technology and innovation (to the tune of over $1.5 billion), which is also good. A lot of NASA’s successes have been from pushing the limits on what can be done. It also stresses Earth science, which isn’t surprising at all; Obama appears to understand the importance of our environmental impact, including global warming. So that’s still good news.

The very very good news is that half that money — half, folks, 3.2 billion dollars — is going to science. Yeehaw! The release specifically notes telescopes and missions to the Moon and planets. That, my friends, sounds fantastic.

NASA’s Constellation program – based largely on existing technologies – was based on a vision of returning astronauts back to the Moon by 2020. However, the program was over budget, behind schedule, and lacking in innovation due to a failure to invest in critical new technologies. Using a broad range of criteria an independent review panel determined that even if fully funded, NASA’s program to repeat many of the achievements of the Apollo era, 50 years later, was the least attractive approach to space exploration as compared to potential alternatives. Furthermore, NASA’s attempts to pursue its moon goals, while inadequate to that task, had drawn funding away from other NASA programs, including robotic space exploration, science, and Earth observations. The President’s Budget cancels Constellation and replaces it with a bold new approach that invests in the building blocks of a more capable approach to space exploration

Ares I was a piece of pork which should have long since been canceled. I'm glad it's gone. Everyone knows there are currently two US boosters (three soon enough) in the same weight and performance category and part of Obama's plan is to use those to go into LEO. This makes sense.

What no one has discussed, either in the pro Constellation crowd or those against, is what the propulsion package will be for Flexible Path. I'd like to see some of the ideas behind DIRECT refined so we end up with a moderately economical, scalable launch architecture for really heavy payloads. COTS is not likely to develop this on their own, they're happy at 25 tons to LEO and under. It's where their profit is. Note, I'm choosing to be optimistic on Flexible path being funded and implemented.

It looks like Orion Lite from Bigelow/Boeing/Lockheed is the front runner for crew transport. I'm not sure how much commonality is possible between it and a future Orion Heavy used for lunar or martian missions. Hopefully building one makes it easier to build the other.

When I was 6 years old my parents moved to Titusville, Florida right across the Indian River Lagoon from the VAB. I grew up watching Saturn V's, Atlas, Delta, Titan, and Shuttle space vehicles thunder skyward. I went to school with the sons and daughters of real "Rocket Scientists". I'd say the number one reason I got into the engineering field was the excitement and allure of these kind of epic and difficult endeavors. What inspires people to go into engineering today ? I only worked on Spacecraft and launch systems for 10 years before I got into other things, but would I have been inspired at all by a presidential challenge to build a better battery, or an energy efficient home ? I somehow doubt it. So I would argue that not only does going to the moon spin-of useful technology it inspires the youth of today and tomorrow to achieve great things in engineering !

>Cutting NASA with respect to the deficit is like putting a bandaid on your finger while ignoring the sucking wound in your chest.

Actually not. A little bit of money here, a little bit of money there, an earmark there, another over there, and not before long you're swimming in red ink.

It's unfortunate that the republicans had to piss away the equivalent of moon trip in Iraq that we now need to have this discussion. If people don't like this, they need to hold those people who continue to be loudmouths on

It got modded troll, but it's 100% true. The Iraq war wasn't a necessary war, at all. It has wasted a trillion dollars, and we have nothing to show for it but a bunch of fresh graves. The money we wasted in Iraq is the elephant in the room no one wants to talk about. 9 billion dollars in Iraq is totally unaccounted for, and the Republican deficit hawks didn't seem to care when it happened and they don't seem to care now. We wasted enough money in Iraq to pay for universal health care, AND a trip to

No, it's one 100% troll. For one thing, the war in Iraq has nothing to do with NASA's budget. For another, picking on wars is like shooting fish in a barrel - you could just as easily argue that getting involved in WW2 was unnecessary for the US.

It has wasted a trillion dollars, and we have nothing to show for it but a bunch of fresh graves.

First off, that's the (estimated) combined cost for both wars, so you're wrong right off the bat. Second, the figures provided by the various "counter" sites are, for some reason, never sourced. If you can provide the raw data to support that claim, I'd very much appreciate it - nobody else seems to know how to find it. Third, there are plenty of things that you can "show for it" - the problem is that you apparently don't think they've been worth the cost.

We wasted enough money in Iraq to pay for universal health care, AND a trip to the moon.

Canadian healthcare - for a population one tenth the size of yours - costs $120+ billion per year. At a cost of roughly 700 billion over 7 years, the Iraq war wouldn't even be enough to fund OUR healthcare, let alone yours. You're living in a dream world. Wake up.

This financial crisis basically showed us that the free market cannot be trusted. It is what got us into this mess in the first place. The government listened to the free market worshipers who said that if left alone, the free market would do the "right thing". Everything would price itself correctly and there would be peace and harmony. What actually happened was that we were shown that the free market is a product of human beings and subject to the whims of human emotion. We had an enormous speculati

It seems to me that the health care bill would double health care spending (medicare + social security) at least.

The UK pays less per person to insure everyone than the US pays to insure a minority. They do more than twice as much with less. If we went with something closer to what every other civilized nation on the planet has, we'll cover more people with better care for a decrease in spending.

But you are right in the practical sense, the Republicans will ensure that any Obama plan is sabotaged with

While I agree with you that cuts are necessary, it must be said that Obama is increasing NASA's funding [discovermagazine.com] despite canceling Project Constellation. The cancellation seems more politically driven than anything relating to the federal budget. Even if NASA's $18 billion budget were left the same, it would still be only 0.5% of the total federal budget. The real pork [wallstats.com] can be found in the $901 billion defense budget and the $696 billion social security program.

Better go look at the budget. Obama's budget *increases* NASA spending while removing its most visible mission. Basically, he plans on creating the next Lockheed or Boeing at taxpayer expense.

Quite the opposite, actually. The current Constellation program favors cost-plus non-competitive contracts, while the new plan uses fixed-price commercial contracts with multiple companies competing and developing in parallel, with companies only getting paid for meeting milestones. For example, a number of companies are currently under "CCDev" contracts for developing commercial crew vehicles and technologies, and only get paid the full amount if they meet all of their milestones by the end of 2010. You can read more about this in the budget documents:

First of all, the amazing Mars rovers (by far the greatest NASA success since Hubble) were designed and built at JPL by NASA scientists. (wiki [wikipedia.org]) And it's exactly projects like this that will get breathing room when the vanity missions about "getting a man to x" get shelved. Compare this mission to the far more expensive ISS when you're wondering about the best way for NASA to add to scientific knowledge.

I admit that there is great value in evenutally establishing human settlements off the Earth, but these

While your point makes sense, I actually suspect that you're wrong. If you give grants to people to "think of something cool", they might not come up with much. But when you give them an inspiring and difficult mission which is impossible with any known technology, they will come up with stuff which in retrospect will probably be cooler than if the same money were directly allocated for cool-stuff-finding. In NASA's glory days, geniuses mustered all the intellectual energy they had to make the missions work

You do realize this argument is really stupid. The basic argument goes that doing something difficult and useless is really helpful because you solve all these engineering problems along the way that are helpful for other areas. If true, then doing something useful and difficult would be much more helpful. Why not develop super efficient engines for various modes of transportation? Why not build great high speed rail that could connect cities at super sonic speeds? Doesn't sound possible? Not really, but neither did putting a man on the moon. Difference is, this one would be something when we were done.

You think he's typing on Velcro? Myself, I am typing on a keyboard. They were around before the space race.

The idea that space exploration is giving us (humanity as a whole) good value for money is, frankly, ridiculous. The billions and billions of dollars spent has of course brought some benefits and some cool inventions. But spending that same money on other kinds of research would with a very high probability have yielded more benefits. But I do agree that it would have yielded less fame to the old whiners from TFA.

In fact we should return to the trees. By my math, raising the living level of 6.8 billion people by three meters yields a net increase in the human living level by 20.4 billion person-meters. We could achieve the same net increase in the level of human life by sending 53 astronauts the 385,000 km to the moon, but it's important to note that would do nothing for the median level.

I actually agree! But I hope you realize that this is a project that would have to take at least 50 years. Also, it's too much to ask to build self-replicating robots. But the materials for the Martian biosphere have to be mined and processed by robots on Mars, and this will be the greatest technological hurdle. (Those robots, or at least their "sensitive parts" could be made on Earth and shipped.) But you know, designing and building such robots would be a useful thing for us on Earth as well, so I honestl

But I think the US Government is right to cut the apron strings between manned lunar exploration and public funding.

One of the biggest issues for lunar activities is going to be infrastructure. That means getting electricity, oxygen, water, food, etc. There are lots of really great theories as to how to do this. What we need is to do is actually start trying these out.

There's uranium on the moon. How do we get to it? How do we use it in a nuclear reactor on the moon? Are we better off with solar? What do we do when we're rotated away from the sun? If we build lots of solar power stations, how do we get the power

... while he was writing about the hopes he had on the space exploration and everything. It makes me sad. In some way I'm glad he's gone so he doesn't have to see this.

Having actually attended a lecture at JPL that Carl Sagan gave on exactly this topic - his views of space exploration, I am fairly certain he would be over joyed at this announcement.

His key point in the lecture was that space science - that is, genuine space exploration - did not require manned flight and was far more economical without it, but was politically dependent on manned flight in the U.S. Thus, support for manned flight was indeed necessary to support space science, but only because of the unfortunate realities of space science funding in the U.S.

Up until now his observation remained valid. He would be thrilled to see this extremely costly and anti-productive link broken.

The cries from the "Oh no! Obama is abandoning space!" crowd underscore the fact that manned space flight is a deadly political anchor on actual space exploration.